It’s been a busy year for Jada Pinkett Smith since the launch of her popular Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk, and things got even more exciting on Monday, June 17, when she accepted the Trailblazer Award at the 2019 MTV Movie & TV Awards.
The Gotham alum, 47, stunned in a sparkly, silver suit as she took the stage at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica alongside her son, Jayden Smith, and delivered a powerful speech about believing in yourself.
“You know, it’s a trip because when MTV called me to receive an award for trailblazing, I was like, ‘All right now, I don’t know if I deserve this quite yet.’ But I’m really glad MTV thinks so,” Smith said before going into detail about her own self-doubt.
“Often we applaud the trails people blaze in the external world that we can see, but very rarely do we applaud the trails that are blazed in the hidden rooms of the mind that are full of uncertainty, false beliefs and pain,” she added. “And it’s these internal obstacles that must be challenged in order to muster the courage to forge new paths that we can see in the world. And then I thought a little more deeply. I was thinking, every last person in this room must do that at some capacity. So that means that every single person in this room is trailblazing … So as you honor me tonight, I want to honor all of you.”
Earlier on Monday, Smith took to Instagram to share her excitement. “That feeling when @MTV hooks ya girl up with that Trailblazer Award,” she captioned a video of herself dancing on the red carpet.
Smith’s career ranges from roles in the TV series Gotham and Hawthorne, animated films such as Madagascar as well as major motion pictures like Girls Trip, Bad Moms, Magic Mike XXL and more.
The A Different World alum wed Will Smith in December 1997 and they share son Jaden, 20, and daughter Willow, 18.
Jada recently opened up about her past struggles after making it big in Hollywood. “I had an emotional breakdown that definitely, I feel like, affected my mental stability,” she said during a December 2018 episode of Red Table Talk. “I had gotten to L.A. and gotten a certain amount of success and realized that that wasn’t the answer … that that wasn’t what was going to make everything OK. Actually, it made things worse. And I became extremely suicidal and I had a complete emotional collapse.”
